


Three Scully Children Who Went Incommunicado (And One Who Didn't)

by MyOwnSuperintendent



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 07:35:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13453488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnSuperintendent/pseuds/MyOwnSuperintendent
Summary: It's not that they don't care about their family.  But there were reasons they had to get away.





	Three Scully Children Who Went Incommunicado (And One Who Didn't)

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own The X-Files or anything related to it. Hope you enjoy!

_One_

Someone has to push the limits, and that someone is usually Melissa.  She’s not the only one who rebels, but she’s the one who does it first and takes it furthest.  Figuring out how to sneak out at night and covering for the others when they follow her lead.  Losing her virginity in high school and saying honestly, when Dana asks her afterwards, that she liked the way it felt and she doesn’t think it’s a sin.  Discovering her own spirituality, being the one who stops going to church altogether while everyone else is still figuring it out.

Disappearing from sight.

She’s never been afraid to be open about her rebellions.  A secret rebellion, she figures, is like the tree that falls in the forest: it might as well not have happened at all.  You can’t be who you want to be if you’re always pretending to be someone else.  And she believes it’s her job to blaze the trail.  She’s not the oldest, but she knows Bill’s not about to do anything like that, that he cares too much about not rocking the boat.  So it’s up to her to help Dana and Charlie, if she can.

That doesn’t mean it’s not wearing, sometimes.  Still not married, Mom.  Still not coming to Mass at Easter, Mom.  Still don’t have matching towels for guests, Mom.  Still not the daughter you want to brag about to your friends, Mom.  It’s not about not feeling good enough.  She does feel good enough—good enough for herself, and that’s what matters.  But she just gets tired.

And so one day she just goes.  She heads out west—scenes of her childhood, ones that she can take in differently now.  She can get in touch, and she does, sometimes, with postcards, just so that everyone knows she’s all right, but no one can get in touch with her with just those basic locations, just knowing that now she’s in Seattle or San Francisco.  She introduces herself to people—“I’m Melissa”—and they take her at face value, without years of built-up expectations.  She does things that shouldn’t be safe—makes her way up and down the coast by hitchhiking, goes home at night with strangers—knowing surely that she will survive.  She does things just because she wants to, cuts her hair short or skinny-dips in the Pacific or learns how to make spanakopita.  She never has to explain.

She stops in at Bill’s when she’s in San Diego.  He hugs her, and she hugs back, and they sit on the porch talking.  It’s been a while since they’ve seen each other—she didn’t come to their dad’s funeral, another one of those things she’s expected to explain and doesn’t know where to begin.  He doesn’t ask her about that, though.  Instead, they fall into old stories, laughing about the time when they put gum in each other’s hair.  He takes a picture of her smiling.  “How’s Tara?” she asks at one point, taking a sip from her lemonade.

“She’s good,” Bill says.  “Things are good.”  She can hear the tension there, though, something that needs to come out.

“What is it?” she asks.  “What’s going on?”

They’ve been trying for a baby, he tells her, and it’s not going as easily as they’d hoped.  “It’s harder than I thought it would be, that’s all,” he says, not really looking at her.  “Seeing her going through this.  I wish there was more I could do.”

“I’m sure it’s hard for both of you,” she says.  She could say more, but she doesn’t.  She loves to give advice, but she knows when it’s not the time for it.

A jerk of his head.  “Missy…don’t tell anyone I told you, all right?”

“Of course,” she says.  “But Bill, you know there are worse things in the world than admitting there’s something wrong, don’t you?”  He doesn’t answer that.  Maybe she didn’t expect him to.

She stays with them overnight, and the next morning the phone rings.  “Hello?” Bill says, answering it.  “Mom, what is it?  What’s wrong?  You sound…She what?  When?...Well, what are they doing to find her?  They have to be doing something…Mom, please stop crying, I’m sure they’ll find her soon…No, Mom, you don’t have to worry about that, she’s fine, she’s here, actually…No, no, she just got here yesterday…Yes, you can talk to her.”  He holds out the phone to Melissa.  “It’s Mom.  She wants to talk to you.”

The call leaves Melissa with a cold feeling of fear in her stomach.  There’s her mom getting upset, and then there’s her mom getting upset, and then there’s the way she sounds now: she’s never heard her like this.  Dana’s disappeared: someone came into her apartment and took her, and now she’s gone into thin air.  They’re still looking for her, her partner leading the search, but they don’t have much to go on.  At least that’s what Melissa makes out from her mom’s muffled words.  “I’ll come home,” she tells her mom quietly.  “I’ll come home.  I’ll be there with you.”

When she’s on the plane heading back east, she wonders if she might have caused this.  A need for cosmic balance: one sister returns, the other disappears.  She wonders if she set the example like she’s always wanted to do, showed her younger sister how to vanish.  She knows this isn’t really the same thing.  She wonders anyway.

 

_Two_

If he’d had to guess who was never going to speak to him again, Charlie would have guessed Mary.  And he wouldn’t have blamed her, in that case: he figured she would have had every right.  But it isn’t like that with her.  She’s upset when he finally tells her, of course, and it isn’t easy, but it gets better, slowly but surely.  Now—now they’re friends.  They hang out and talk when they drop the kids off.  They have dinner together sometimes, all four of them, him and Adam and her and Mark.  They’re happier than they ever were when they were married.

And if he had to make a second guess after Mary, he would have guessed the kids, of course.  Breaking up the family—that’s all on him.  That part isn’t easy at first either, and today he still worries that he might have screwed them up, but at the moment they seem well-adjusted.  When he asked Amanda if she minded having four parents come to her school concert, she said no, a lot of her friends had divorced parents, and Michael said the same.  They’re the only ones among their friends with a gay parent, as far as he knows, but so far they seem all right with that part too.  They get along well with Adam; the two of them aren’t planning on any more kids, but Adam always treats Charlie’s as his own.  They’re happy kids, still.

He wants to yell that sometimes—that the kids are fine, they’re happy and not screwed up—but it’s his mother he wants to yell it at, and it’s not like she’s about to listen.  They don’t speak, now, but when they were still speaking that was one of the things she was always bringing up: what this whole thing was going to do to the kids.  He’d like to tell her that it hasn’t done anything to them, that in some ways they’re a lot better off now than when they were living in a home where one parent did not want the life he had.  (“God, we were so messed up, weren’t we?” Mary says to him one time.  “I didn’t even realize it.”  And he nods, because it’s true.) 

But she’s always couched it like that, his mother, in words that sound like concern and feel like punches.  The closest she comes to losing it is when he first tells her; he’s driven out to her place specially to do it.  She’s so shocked she can barely form sentences.  “I don’t believe…you can’t be doing this,” she says, and “Your father and I didn’t raise you to…you just can’t be doing this,” and “You and Mary…you could work it out…a lot of couples go through…”  And when he says as gently as he can that that isn’t going to happen under the circumstances, she just goes back to the headshaking and the “You can’t be doing this.” 

“I can and I am, Mom,” he finally says.  “It’s what I need to do.  It’s who I am.”

She stiffens at that, opens her mouth, closes it again.  “Could you go, Charlie?” she says.  “I can’t talk about this with you.”

That’s not the last time they talk, of course.  The next time is when she starts bringing up the kids.  “This is going to be so hard on Amanda and Michael,” she says.  “What kind of way will this be, for children to live?  You’re not setting much of an example for them.”  He tries to tell himself that she’s just talking about the divorce or about the fact that he fell in love with Adam while he was still married to Mary.  It’s easier to think that she’s upset about something he did as opposed to something he is.  It gets harder and harder to tell himself that with every comment—when he tells her they’re doing joint custody, she says, “I’m surprised Mary agreed to that” in the kind of tone she might use if Mary had just agreed to let the kids spend half their time picking up rusty nails—but he keeps trying.  He wants this to work.

The rest of the family is a mixed bag.  He’s pretty sure his dad would have been on his mom’s side and that Melissa would have been on his.  Where his mom goes, Bill goes.  “You’re actually going through with this?” he asks Charlie one day over the phone.

“Yes, I am,” Charlie says.  “So you can shut up about it.”  He doesn’t feel the same need to walk on eggshells with Bill, at least.

Bill ignores the suggestion.  “Well, I think you’re seriously making a mistake,” he says.  “None of you think, do you?  You’re all killing Mom.”

He’s a little lost, now.  “What are you talking about?”

“You doing…doing this,” Bill says.  He won’t even say the words.  “And Dana…she doesn’t want to admit she’s sick.  She’s still going out there, risking her life—”

“Dana’s sick?”  The two of them haven’t talked in a while—there’s just been so much going on.  He hasn’t yet told her what’s going on with him either.

“I’m not surprised she didn’t tell you either,” Bill says.  “Just like I said.  None of you think.  She has cancer.”

As Bill fills him in on what he knows, which isn’t much, Charlie finds himself fixating more on the way he says it.  There’s a tone of blame underlying everything, and clearly he believes what he said: _You’re all killing Mom._   Charlie wonders if Bill thinks he and Dana got up some kind of plot together, that they decided to have this happen with the sole goal of upsetting their mother.  It’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard, but that doesn’t mean Bill wouldn’t think it.

He’s not sure if he should call Dana—if she didn’t tell him, she presumably doesn’t want him to know—but they end up talking a couple of weeks later.  As far as he’s heard from Bill, she took a turn for the worse and then suddenly for the better; now it seems like she’s going to be okay.  “Heard you almost died,” he blurts out over the phone.

“Yeah,” she says.  “Heard you were getting divorced.”  And then suddenly they’re both laughing; nothing about it is funny in the slightest, and yet once he’s started he can’t stop. 

“Did Bill…tell you…we were both killing…Mom?” he gasps out.  “Like we have some…evil plot…”

“Yes…I’m still not sure if I’m…supposed to apologize for having a tumor…oh God, I can’t…”

They talk when they’ve managed to calm down, more soberly.  She’s in remission now, she tells him, and it looks like everything’s going to be all right; she doesn’t tell him she was scared, but he hears it in her voice.  And he tells her the whole story, about Adam and how they met and how he decided he couldn’t pretend any longer.  She’s quiet at first, and he can’t help worrying, but then she says, “I’m sorry about Mom and Bill.  You know I’ve always got your back.”

“Thanks, Dana,” he says.  He can’t tell her how much that means now.  “I’ve got yours too.”

His mom seems in a better mood the next time he talks to her—which would make sense, if she’s been worrying about Dana—and for once she doesn’t seem to be trying to convince him to change his mind.  When he tells her that the divorce will be final later this week she just says, “Oh.  All right,” which seems like some kind of accomplishment.  “I wanted to talk to you about Christmas, by the way,” she says.  “Bill said we should all come out to California this year.  Because of Tara and the baby, you know.  Are you going to be able to make it?”

“Yeah, I don’t see why not,” Charlie says.  “Mary and I will have to talk about the kids, of course.  But I should be.”

She’s quiet for a moment.  “Of course I’d love to see the kids,” she says.  “But otherwise…you’ll come by yourself, won’t you?”

So much for thinking she was in a better mood.  “I would think I’d come with Adam,” he says.  “Since he’s my partner.”

“Charlie,” she says.  “Don’t.”

“Don’t what, Mom?  You’re going to have to get used to this,” he says.  “Because it isn’t going away.  I’m gay.  You know that now, Mom.  And if you can’t accept it…”  He doesn’t know quite how to finish that sentence.

“You’re still my son, Charlie,” she says.  “And I still love you.  I always will, but you can’t ask me to pretend I’m happy about this.  And you can’t…of course I want you there, but this man—”

“He has a name,” Charlie says.

“Fine,” she says.  “Adam, then.  I don’t have to love him just because I love you.  And I don’t have to want him there for Christmas.”

“Well, if you want me there, you’re going to have to at least put up with him there,” Charlie says.  “Because that’s how it is now, Mom.”

“It’s up to you,” she says.  “I’m not telling you not to come.”  It would be so much simpler if she were.  “But I am asking you not to bring Adam.”

He barely manages to finish the conversation.  He talks to Adam about it; Adam says he’ll stay home if that would make it easier, but Charlie says no, absolutely not, that isn’t what he wants.  The next time he sees Mary, she says, “Hey, I wanted to let you know that I told your mom I wasn’t going to join you guys at Christmas.  I just think…it would be too hard for me this year.  Could you make sure she understands that?”  Another punch thrown when he wasn’t looking.  He doesn’t make sure his mom understands that, because the next time she calls him, he doesn’t pick up.

He and Adam stay in for Christmas, and he doesn’t talk to anyone from the family on the day.  Dana shows up at his apartment soon after New Year’s, though, saying, “It was the worst Christmas, Charlie, the worst fucking Christmas,” and the two of them get horribly, horribly drunk.  In the morning, his head aches and he doesn’t feel any better.  Dana looks equally bad.  They hug quickly before she gets a cab home.

“We missed you at the holidays,” his mom’s voice says on the answering machine one day.  “Give me a call.”

He purposely calls when he knows she’ll be at church.  “I missed you all too,” he says in his message, because it’s true.  “But I won’t come without Adam.  Next year, maybe.”

There’s never a dramatic moment of rupture.  He still sees his mom sometimes, making his way through the sideways comments and the concerned looks, and then he doesn’t.  They still talk on the phone, and she never wants to hear about anything involving Adam, and then they don’t.  He’s invited for the holidays, every year, but it’s always clear that he’s the only one who’s invited, so he never goes.

This year they’re doing their usual thing: they have Christmas Eve with Amanda and Michael, and on the day itself the kids go with Mary and he and Adam go to Adam’s family.  He talks to Dana on the phone on the morning of the twenty-fourth; she and the baby are going to their mom’s.  Sometimes he thinks about asking her to pass on a message from him, but he always decides against it.  In the first place, he doesn’t want to put her in the middle, and then there’s really no point to it anyway.  His mom knows what she has to do to get him there.  She never does it.

 

_Three_

It’s 6:03 AM on Sunday, May 11 when Scully gives up on sleeping and gets out of bed.  Last year she didn’t get out of bed all day.  Progress.  She gets dressed quietly, leaves a note for Mulder— _Went out to walk on the beach_ —and slips out of the motel room.

It hasn’t been an easy day for her for years now.  What’s Mother’s Day supposed to mean when you know you can never be a mother?  When you were a mother for mere days?  When you finally got to be a mother and threw it all away?  They don’t make greeting cards for any of that.

But in the past, she’s always been a daughter, at least, has always had that part of the day to hold onto.  She could always get her mom a card and take her out to lunch, focus on making someone else happy and turn her thoughts away from herself.  Now—well, she’s still a daughter, technically, but she certainly can’t take her mom out to lunch.  She could probably get a card, walk into town and send one off without a return address, but it seems like such a hollow gesture.  She doesn’t know if her mom would find it reassuring or worrying.  She hasn’t been able to talk to her all year.  Just another reason for this day to hurt.

She doesn’t regret it, not for a moment.  She’s not proud of all the choices she’s made, but this one, she knows, was right.  They can’t be without each other, her and Mulder; they need each other or they just don’t work right.  It’s not always easy, but she’s happy now: happy that they get to be together again, that now they’re not letting each other go, that they’re still doing all the things they’ve always done best, traveling and talking and touching.  The things she’s left behind—her apartment and her job and a conventional sense of stability and safety—don’t matter to her in the same way.  By this point, there’s not a lot for her to miss.

She’s on the beach now—it’s not far from the motel where they’re staying—and she walks with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, thinking about what she does miss.  None of it’s easy to think about.  William first, of course, always William, every day.  He should be with them, right now; it wouldn’t be easy, taking a baby along on the road, but it would be a hell of a lot easier than feeling this way.  He’s almost two, now.  He’d be walking and talking.  For a second she lets herself imagine a Mother’s Day with the three of them—they’d bring her breakfast in bed, maybe, and she’d hug them close.  The image is a little sappy.  She doesn’t care.  Then she thinks about how it must be some other woman’s Mother’s Day now, some woman she doesn’t even know.  She shakes her head and takes off her shoes to wade into the ocean.  The pebbles are sharp under her feet.  She doesn’t try to avoid them. 

If the ocean makes her think about anyone, it’s usually her dad, but today it’s her mom.  Her mom was always there when she was growing up, after all, even when her dad was at sea.  Sometimes they’d go out and walk by the water together, talking about him far away.  She’s always been able to count on her mom, from those long-ago days through the recent past; she’s had her to lean on, even in the times when she hasn’t wanted to do it.  That’s gone, now.  Her mom has no idea where she is.  When they left, Skinner promised he’d let her mom know that she was all right, and she hopes he kept that promise.  She hates to think of her mother worrying, even though she knows she probably is.  She hopes she’s not alone today; maybe Bill was able to be there, if he’s not at sea.  Wherever he is, he’ll call her if he possibly can.  Scully’s glad of that, anyway.  Good old Bill.

She remembers a Mother’s Day from when she was growing up—she must have been about six or seven.  She and Missy had made a card together, using their big box of crayons, laboriously drawing rainbows and flowers and a picture of all of them.  And then on Mother’s Day itself, Charlie spilled his juice on it, not on purpose or anything, but the whole card got stained red.  She cried, she remembers, and she thinks Missy cried too.  But their mom told them she loved the card anyway.  “We’ll put it on the windowsill to dry out,” she said, “and when it’s dry it’ll be beautiful.”  She gave them a hug and told them how happy she was that they had made it for her, and they stopped crying pretty fast.  Her mom’s always had that way about her, wanting to comfort them, wanting to make things better, no matter what had happened.  It’s helped sustain Scully through the years.  She could use some of that now. 

She can’t think about it too much, though.  She doesn’t want to think about missing her mom; it’s still too hard.  So, even though it’s hard in a different way, she makes herself think instead about another Mother’s Day, 1998.  Not even five months after Emily had died—the rawness she felt, the longing.  She had lunch with her mom, trying to smile through it.  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” her mom asked, and she still can’t decide if it was irrational that her first reaction was something along the lines of _What do you mean what’s wrong, I can’t believe you’re not thinking about it, sometimes I think I’m the only one who cares about this at all._

“I was just…I was thinking about Emily,” she said, taking a deep breath, fiddling with her fork.

Her mom patted her hand and said, “I’m so sorry.  I know you’re having a hard time.”  But she didn’t say anything more, and Scully couldn’t help thinking that she didn’t really understand.  It’s strange—she would have thought that both of them being mothers would have brought them closer, but that was the one area where she never felt like they quite connected.  First with Emily: she knew that her mom didn’t see Emily the same way she did, as surely her daughter even if she’d only been in her life for a brief time, even if she hadn’t come to be in the ordinary way.  “Maybe you should try again,” her mom told her once.  “Doctors…there are things they can do, you know.”  And even though she was, in fact, trying again at that very time, she felt like screaming, because first of all she was a fucking doctor, she didn’t need to be told that, and second of all, she wasn’t going to replace Emily, whether it worked or whether it didn’t.  She never told her mom about the IVF.  She was glad she didn’t, in the end.

Her mom didn’t understand about William either.  That was fraught from the beginning. They hadn’t talked for a while when Scully found out she was pregnant, for reasons she couldn’t fully articulate; maybe she hadn’t wanted to explain what she and Mulder had when she was still figuring it out for herself, hadn’t wanted to make something private and wondrous open for comment.  She wasn’t as surprised as Scully had thought she might be when she finally told her, and she was there helping during her pregnancy, but there were still things she couldn’t explain to her mom: why she was still working, where things stood between her and Mulder when he came back, why she was sometimes scared.  She didn’t understand why Mulder left again when William was less than a week old.  And when Scully told her about the choice she’d made, how she’d had to give William up to keep him safe, she looked at her like she’d murdered her child.  Scully wasn’t sure if she didn’t understand, then, or if she understood too well.  Whichever it was, she didn’t like seeing that look on her mom’s face.

So things weren’t always easy between them, at the end.  There are things about her mom she doesn’t miss.  That doesn’t exactly make her feel better.

She hears footsteps, close by, and jumps, turning around.  It’s just Mulder.  He smiles at her.  “Hey,” he says.  “There you are.”

“Here I am,” she says.  She holds out a hand as he wades into the water beside her, and he takes it.  They stand there for a while, feeling the waves around their feet. 

He wraps his arms around her after a few minutes and pulls her in close.  “I’ve got you,” he says, his mouth against her ear.  “I love you.”

She nods against him.  “I love you too,” she says, hearing the thickness in her own voice.  She presses her face into his chest.  In the early morning light, they stand in the ocean holding each other.

 

_One_

Matthew stares down at the sweater in the box with an unhappy look on his face.  “It’s so ugly,” he says.

“It’s not ugly,” Bill says, and when Matthew makes a disgusted face he adds sharply, “Hey.  Cut that out.  It was very nice of your grandmother to think of you.”

“Do I have to wear it?” Matthew asks.

“Yes, you do,” Bill says.  “She’ll want to see it on you when she comes to visit.  And you need to write her a thank you note, too.” 

“Everybody just talks on the phone now,” Matthew says.  “Nobody writes thank you notes anymore.”

“Well, then everybody is rude,” Bill says.  “But you don’t have to be.  Go write to your grandmother and say thank you.”  Matthew makes another face, but when Bill gives him a look in return he scuttles off in the direction of his room.  He should probably check to see that Matthew’s actually writing, he knows, but he stops to study the sweater himself, pulling it out of the box.  It’s a greenish shade.  Some kind of orange truck on the front.

He was lying when he told Matthew that it wasn’t ugly, because it is, very.  That isn’t what matters, though.  Just because a sweater is ugly doesn’t mean you have to make a fuss about it.  You don’t have to say that it’s ugly or refuse to wear it or not write a thank you note.  What good’s that going to do?  It would only hurt his mom.

Sure, it seems like a small thing, just a sweater, but still.  He’d be the biggest asshole in the world if he did anything to hurt his mom now, or let Matthew do it.  She’s already been through more than enough.  She’s only got him, now.  Melissa’s gone.  No one’s talked to Charlie in years.  Well, he thinks Dana used to talk to him, but now Dana’s gone too, somewhere or other.  He gave up on understanding what the hell was going on with her a while ago, but she’s taken off, he knows that much.  He thinks they’re selfish—well, not Melissa, she wasn’t to blame, and he always thought she cared more than she let on.  But the other two, yeah.  Selfish.

They don’t seem to understand what it means to be part of a family.  It means that you can’t always put yourself first—you have to think about what everyone else might be feeling.  You don’t just do something because it’s what’s easiest for you personally.  He’s always tried to live that way.  He doesn’t think Dana and Charlie get it.

It’s not like he’s never disagreed with their mom.  He disagrees with her about this sweater, for one thing.  About a lot of the things she buys for Matthew, actually, because they usually seem to be aimed at a child a few years younger.  (He’s not sure if she’s lost track of how old Matthew is or if she just doesn’t have a good idea of what kids at different ages like.)  Still, he’s not going to say anything about it.  She doesn’t have to buy all those presents for Matthew—she does it because she cares.  He’s the only grandchild she has in her life now, again thanks to Dana and Charlie, and even if she wants to buy him stuff that’s more suited to a seven-year-old than a nine-year-old, it would be pretty ungrateful to complain about it.  She’s so generous with him.  She just wants Matthew to be happy.

And it’s only reasonable for Bill to think about what makes her happy in return.  Things like spending the holidays together, for example.  He’s talked about it with Tara, pointing out how alone his mom would be without them.  He knows she has a point too, when she says that her parents would like to have them occasionally, but he doesn’t know quite what to do about it.  They’ve tried hosting, so that they can see everyone, but their parents don’t always like flying around the holidays, and besides Tara has a pretty big family.  Considering how many of them there are, he thinks they don’t need to be there quite as much as they need to be with his mom, but he still knows it isn’t fair.  It’s a compromise.  That’s part of life.  Of course, he can’t help noticing, sometimes, that he’s always the one who’s compromising.  And again he comes back to Dana and Charlie, who have decided that they don’t need to be there.  That leaves it all on him—if he’s not going to be there now, who is?

Not that it’s that big of a deal.  He loves his mom and likes seeing her; sometimes he wishes they got to see each other more often, that it didn’t always have to be a production.  When he was growing up, he was used to not seeing his dad all the time; he understood that it was part of his dad’s job, but he promised himself that when he grew up he’d do as much as he could to make sure they all still saw each other a lot.  All in all, he hasn’t done so great with that.  But he’ll always do the best he can.

He puts the sweater back into the box and goes into Matthew’s room.  “How’s the note going?” he asks.

“Okay.”  Matthew shows him a piece of paper.  _Dear Grandma, Thank you for the sweater.  I will wear it._   “I don’t know what else to put.”

“Say ‘Thank you for thinking of me,’” Bill suggests.  “And tell her you’re looking forward to seeing her.” 

“Okay,” Matthew says, starting to write.  “Do I have to wear it all the time?” he asks. 

Bill thinks about telling him that it’s a perfectly good sweater.  “Just when you see your grandma, okay?” he says.

“Fine,” Matthew says.  He finishes the note and signs his name.  Bill picks it up.

“I’ll mail it,” he says.  “Look, I know you don’t like the sweater.  But this’ll make her really happy.”  


End file.
